CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland City Council on Wednesday approved a new set of ward boundaries, which Council President Martin J. Sweeney says improves upon the version council adopted last month by unifying voting precincts and bolstering the city's only Hispanic voting bloc.

Council voted 14-4 to adopt the revisions, with Councilmen Michael Polensek, Joe Cimperman, Jeffrey Johnson and Kevin Conwell voting no. Councilman Brian Cummins was absent, on a trip to China.

Polensek and Cimperman also had voted against the initial ward maps, which were adopted last month. But Conwell and Johnson had quietly voted in favor of the maps the first time -- despite the fact that their wards were consolidated, pitting them against each other in the November election.

Conwell said he cast his dissenting vote Wednesday because residents in his ward were incensed by the lack of transparency in the map-drawing process.

The contentious and controversial council redistricting process has provoked resident protests in council chambers, intervention of state legislators and the threat of legal action on behalf of Hispanic voters. The council redraws the lines every decade following the federal census, and the city charter requires the size of the council to shrink from 19 wards to 17 because of population loss since the last redistricting.

Sweeney holds the pen throughout the process, and he has met with consultant Bob Dykes behind closed doors for months.

The council had planned to vote on a new set of changes Monday night. But council members received legislation describing the new boundaries about two hours before the vote and requested more time to review the map.

Dykes told council members during a Finance Committee meeting Monday that revisions continued through the weekend, as he worked with Cuyahoga County Board of Elections officials and Sweeney to make adjustments that would shore up the Hispanic voting bloc in West Side Ward 14.

The first council-approved version of the map splintered that ward's Hispanic population -- dropping its concentration from 41 percent to 37 percent -- potentially diluting the power of the Hispanic vote.

Jose Feliciano, an attorney and the chairman of the Hispanic Roundtable, had cautioned council members that those changes could amount to a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

To avoid a potential lawsuit, a new draft of the map released Friday increased the Ward 14 Hispanic population to 39.6 percent. Monday's version supplemented the ward with another 900 Hispanic residents, further boosting its Hispanic concentration to 41.2 percent, Dykes said.

By Wednesday morning, that percentage topped out at 41.4.

But Feliciano said in an interview Tuesday that council should have aimed for at least 50 percent Hispanics in Ward 14 and that protecting voting rights should have been a higher priority for Sweeney than protecting political allies.

Feliciano recently had submitted a public records request for all drafts, notes, studies, databases and emails related to the redistricting process to help determine whether the outcome might merit a lawsuit.

Feliciano said Wednesday that the records he has received so far contain no census data or alternative maps of the ward or the city. And none of the emails indicates concern over preserving the Hispanic voting bloc, he said.

"It was a data dump, and it was meaningless," he said. "They need to come forward and explain how the highest scrutiny that the law applies doesn't apply to them. Getting this information has been like a tooth extraction. This is not the way a government should be treating the fundamental Constitutional rights of a protected class."

The last-minute revisions to satisfy the Hispanic contingent caused a domino effect of dissatisfaction among council members in surrounding wards, who were forced to relinquish parts of neighborhoods they had hoped to keep whole.

Councilman Brian Cummins, who represents Ward 14, has championed the Hispanic voting bloc throughout the redistricting process. But this week, he called Sweeney, Feliciano and The Plain Dealer from his travels in China to say that he believes the manipulation of boundaries to draw in more Hispanics has gone too far -- resulting in lines that look like jagged teeth and the division of neighborhoods like Brooklyn Centre and Tremont.

The West Side turf war follows on the heels of controversy over ward boundaries in the city's Northeast corner, where Sweeney is accused of tailoring the map to suit the needs of Councilman Eugene Miller. His ward is the least compact of all on the new map, spanning from Collinwood westward and along a sliver of the lakefront to make up for population loss since the last census.

Councilman Michael Polensek has publicly accused Miller of choosing which streets he wants to represent and which he would like to abandon because the residents there do not support him.

Miller's ward lines cut out specific streets -- even his own. His home on Kelso Avenue off East 136th Street, will be in Polensek's ward when the maps take effect in January.

Miller announced at a recent council meeting that he plans to move into the new Ward 10.

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